From Siberia to Cyberia

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From Siberia to Cyberia

Plenty of museums are putting thumbnail galleries of their collections on the Net, but New York's Museum of Modern Art is using the Web to do something else: Open up the curatorial process.

For the museum's latest online exhibit, coyly named InterNyet, MoMA video and film curator Barbara London is venturing to Russia and the Ukraine – digital cameras, DAT recorder, and ThinkPad in hand – to meet and document a new generation of Soviet artists who are eagerly embracing digital technology and the Net.

London's images, interviews, and commentary will be posted to the MoMA site, giving visitors a nearly real-time glimpse of the ways that new voices are discovered in art. Designer and collaborator Vivian Selbo – the former interface designer of ädaweb – will add pages to the site daily from files emailed by London. She will post her first dispatch from St. Petersburg on Monday, and will travel on to Moscow, Kiev, Odessa, and the Siberian cities of Novobirsk and Tomsk.

"From going to a foreign country with an open-ended list of names, to networking, to visiting studios, we'll offer a look at the process of being a curator from the very beginning," says Selbo, who also collaborated with London on Stir-Fry, a similar journey of discovery that London took to China in September 1997.

Interviews with the artists and London's footage of their work will be available on the site in RealAudio and RealVideo. MoMA video curator Sally Berger says that the multimedia format of an online exhibition will allow London to explore the "culture, language, and friends that influence the work. Barbara is someone who's always thinking about the situation that surrounds the art."

Berger adds that artists often work in isolation and feel they don't have access to discussion of their work in a larger context. Visitors to the site can participate in an online forum on the art and the issues raised by the new technology.

Interestingly, the emergence in the last year of centralized free email services, such as Hotmail, has made it easier to create on-the-road exhibits like InterNyet. London makes multiple copies of her files and forwards them to various online destinations accessible via Web, telnet, and FTP – a necessary kind of flexibility in countries where resources for getting online are still hard to come by.

London founded the museum's video exhibition program in 1974, showcasing artists such as Laurie Anderson, Nam June Paik, Bill Viola, and Ed Emshwiller. The trip is being underwritten by the museum's international council and the Trust for Mutual Understanding, a private grant-making organization that gives out roughly US$2 million a year for cultural and environmental projects.